Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Washington Irving chose to be buried 200 yards from the churchyard where he set the Headless Horseman chase, in a 90-acre cemetery holding 47,000 interments including Carnegie, Chrysler, and Rockefeller. The adjacent Old Dutch Church (opened 1685) is the traditional origin of the Horseman legend, and visitors report their own sightings independent of Irving's fiction.

Washington Irving is buried here, about 200 yards from the churchyard where he set the most famous chase scene in American literature. The man who invented the Headless Horseman chose to spend eternity in the same landscape that inspired the story. That tells you something about this place.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery spreads across 90 rolling, wooded acres in the village that renamed itself after Irving's tale (it was North Tarrytown until 1996). Established in 1849, the cemetery holds approximately 47,000 interments, including Andrew Carnegie, Walter Chrysler, Samuel Gompers, Elizabeth Arden, Leona Helmsley, Brooke Astor, and William Rockefeller. Irving himself supported the cemetery's creation, writing: "I have no pecuniary interest in it, yet I hope it may succeed, as it will keep that beautiful and umbrageous neighborhood sacred from the anti-poetical and all-leveling axe."

Adjacent to the cemetery sits the Old Dutch Church, opened in 1685, one of the oldest churches in New York. Its three-acre burying ground predates the cemetery by more than 160 years and is, according to local tradition, the origin of the Headless Horseman legend. Irving based his story on existing folklore about a Hessian soldier who lost his head to a cannonball during the Revolutionary War. In the tale, the horseman tethers his steed to graves in the churchyard and rides out at night searching for his missing head. Ichabod Crane races toward the bridge to escape him.

The cemetery itself has its own reported hauntings, separate from Irving's fiction. Visitors describe feeling watched while walking the narrow, twisting roads between mausoleums. Hikers in the surrounding woods talk about a presence following them. Locals have reported seeing figures near the Old Dutch Church at dusk, and some claim to hear whispers near the oldest headstones, the ones with 18th-century death's head carvings that predate the Romantic-era angels and urns.

The ghost of Major John Andre, a British soldier hanged as a spy during the Revolution, reportedly haunts nearby Patriots Park where he was captured. Visitors have heard cries and seen spectral figures in the area. There's also a story about a woman who froze to death in a snowstorm near the cemetery and now appears to warn others away.

The Bronze Lady, a cemetery statue, has generated its own paranormal reputation. Visitors report seeing her move or finding her in positions that don't match where she was the last time they passed by.

What makes Sleepy Hollow Cemetery more interesting than most "haunted cemeteries" is the layering. There's the pre-Revolutionary Dutch burying ground. There's the 1849 cemetery with its Gilded Age monuments. There's Irving's fiction, written in 1820, drawing on even older Hessian folklore. And then there's the modern paranormal claims, which exist independently of the story. Ghost hunters and paranormal investigation teams have made the Old Dutch Church a regular destination, and several television documentaries have filmed there.

The cemetery offers guided lantern tours for $45 per person. Gates open at 8 a.m. and close at 4:30 p.m. sharp. Free legal-sized maps are available at the entrances, plus detailed full-color maps for purchase.

Irving died in 1859, just ten years after the cemetery he championed opened. He got his wish. The neighborhood stayed beautiful, and the axe never came. The horseman, real or otherwise, still draws people up the hill.